Anchorage Daily News

National championship ski races: Canceled.

Interior air travelers: Stranded.

Ice and snow art extravaganza: In full gear.

Sure, it's cold out there. Minus 30 Sunday morning at Anchorage's cold spot, the Campbell Creek Science Center. Colder here than in Barrow. No records, just a long bitter cold snap in much of the state.

We're Alaskans, and we deal with it.

ICY ART

Out on the Delaney Park Strip, some 50 artists, heavy equipment operators, engineers and architects were working Sunday in double-digit negative temperatures to create huge art installations. Human heads, out of ice. Two black Cadillacs frozen in an icy cylinder, their headlamps glowing. A 99-foot long table, with a trough on top that will be filled with a mixture meant to mimic oil and water.

The frozen art, and related films, lectures and performances, are part of a project called "Freeze" organized by Julie Decker, an Anchorage curator and artist.

The work started Jan. 1, near the start of the deep freeze. The public opening will be Saturday.

"It might be perfect," Decker said, hoping for slightly warmer days by then.

The crews are experimenting with how to stay warm while sculpting super-cold snow and ice. Some teams are putting in nine-hour days.

So far, the artists don't need the loaner freezer van to preserve their creations, she said, but they are piling into the heated construction trailer to save fingers and toes.

"We are becoming arctic experts. The snow turns to dust," Decker said. So they must figure out how to put moisture back in.

And what of the ice? Artists are using 52 two-ton blocks of Fairbanks' famed, clear glacier-blue diamond ice.

"It's almost too cold for ice even. The ice is becoming really brittle and cracking in ways that it wouldn't if it were 20 degrees warmer," she said.

SO COLD FOR SO LONG

The big freeze, which is gripping much of Alaska, hasn't set any records. But by the time it ends, which could be Thursday, Anchorage residents may be able to claim they survived the third longest cold snap on record, meteorologists say.

By Sunday, the official readings at the National Weather Service office on Sand Lake Road had stayed below zero for six days in a row. That's a tie for the fifth-longest cold snap. And Sand Lake is one of the warmer spots in town.

The high pressure system that's locking in the chill should move east toward Canada, allowing temperatures to slowly rise by Thursday afternoon to somewhere above zero, said Renee Wise, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Anchorage.

If that holds true, the cold snap will have lasted nine days.

The last time it was this cold was 1999, when Anchorage didn't reach zero for seven days, tied for fourth longest stretch, said Shaun Baines, another meteorologist.

But he doesn't think the cold spell will stretch 13 days, as it did in 1947, or 14 days, the record from way back in 1917.

The coldest spot in Alaska on Sunday? In the Interior. The O'Brien Creek area along the Taylor Highway recorded minus 65.

In the Butte it was minus 36. In Palmer, minus 30.

The coldest Jan. 4 on record for Anchorage was in 1975, when the official reading at the weather station was minus 31. Much balmier there today, at minus 17. Barrow was minus 11 Sunday morning, but it got colder there as the day progressed.

TOO COLD FOR SPANDEX

At Kincaid Park, sprint races for the U.S. Cross Country Ski Championships were canceled Sunday for the second day in a row.

These are national championship races, drawing 400 skiers from Alaska and beyond: Michigan, Nevada, Wyoming, the Northwest and eastern schools including Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, said John Quinley, a spokesman for the event.

At Kincaid, the temperature midday was about minus 10. The cutoff for racing is generally minus 4. While some competitive skiers ventured onto the trails Sunday, they were wearing layers, not just thin Spandex. And they were mainly checking out the course and testing their wax, not flying at race speeds, he said.

Freestyle distance races are set for today, if it's warm enough, but the course has been shortened to 5 kilometers for the women and 10-K for the men, Quinley said.

The sprint races have tentatively been rescheduled for Tuesday. Anchorage's Kikkan Randall is a top seed.

The championship event runs through Thursday.

"The Kincaid Chalet sort of looks like the airport when there aren't any planes flying," Quinley said Sunday afternoon. People sitting around, playing cards, waiting for some news.

ALL RELATIVE

Which brings us to Edna Peters of Ruby. She is in Anchorage with her son to visit relatives, shop and see some movies. They were supposed to leave last week but couldn't get to Ruby because of the cold and ice fog in the Interior. Now maybe she'll get home Tuesday. Not that she's complaining.

"We're having a ball!" Peters said.

It's a different cold here, she said, if you'd call it that.

"I never wear gloves when it is this warm," she said. "Everything is relative."

The air service she uses, Fairbanks-based Warbelow's Air Ventures, had to cancel all its flights Saturday and Sunday, according to an employee there. First the cold, and then the ice fog.

Surprisingly, people aren't showing up in the hospital with frost bite or other cold injuries, said Dr. Richard Navitsky, medical director of the emergency department at Providence Alaska Medical Center.

Maybe people are more careful, he said. Or they are staying home.

Find Lisa Demer online at adn.com/contact/ldemer or call 257-4390.

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